


but it's better if you do

by abusedtrademarkemoji



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Porn with Feelings, Unrequited Love, gratuitous amounts of smut, no ffh spoilers, you wouldn't even believe it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-06-09 22:25:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19485238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abusedtrademarkemoji/pseuds/abusedtrademarkemoji
Summary: “Michelle and I got married last night.” He prepares himself for the worst.“You and MJ, huh?” Tony observes without any incredulity to spare. Peter looks over to where Michelle is blowing on her too-hot tea. “Took a long while with that one.”“Are you-you aren’t surprised?”“Not even a little bit,” he answers, his sound lightening from its post-waking growl into his regular voice through the phone receiver. “Tax purposes—also, you’re in love with her.”[in which peter wakes up married to his big fat stinkin' crush, michelle, who doesn't see what the problem is. he has a lot of questions and everyone else thinks they have the answer.]





	1. day one

It’s a pretty sick dream to wake into, he thinks, when consciousness rouses him into reality. Peter wakes up to Michelle in his arms, which isn’t entirely too odd, but this time is different than the others.

Before they might be tangled together on their sectional with Netflix glowing with the question, “ _Are you still watching?_ ”, or with his head over his folded arms on a library desk and her head on his shoulder with her mess of brown curls curtaining their sleep from bleak overhead lighting. Instead, today he wakes with her tucked into his side, lips ghosting his shoulder. Beyond the blaring ring in his ears, or the drum in his temples, he can’t help but indulge himself in the sight. If he folded her twice, he thinks she might be able to fit in his pocket.

He tries to flick back into what his last known, clear memory was. They were with Ned, drinking at the bar they like with a broken jukebox and $4 Coronas on Sundays. It was his birthday. 23 and counting. Then… then? He remembers hands, and dancing—in the club with a hundred jumping strangers, on the street with just Michelle slow, silent, and alone. His head is fuzzy with alcohol and nightmares.

This is where things become unusual. Once his mind has properly taken in her glowing, still sleeping face, he notices the hand that rests on her hip. More exactly, he becomes aware of the tacky silver band that sits over the ring finger of his left hand. When his sight flicks to where Michelle’s hand is curled and resting just over his heart. Her own finger wears a cheap matching ring, only hers is thinner.

There is a premature swooping in his gut when he sees that their shirts are off. He’s seen her enough times booking it out of the bathroom in just a towel or bra that it doesn’t stun him like the first time. Instead it leaves him with the dead weight reminder that this will probably be the last time he ever gets to see her like this, before she grows uncomfortable when around him. This is the last time before the night changes and life is real and she leaves him, and nothing is ever the same.

He needs to pry himself out from this spiralling.

Peter has been with enough girls before to know what the shadows of his fingers look like when they dimple over the hips of the victim. He moves his hand to the side to properly study it. Underneath his genuine concern is a thought that is a little bit darker than the rest of them. Peter knows enough about himself to be able to recognize what the night leaves for the morning when his hands wander. He has a poor habit of gripping a touch too tightly, but in his defense, it’s only because he wants her impossibly closer. And because he likes the feel of her underneath him. Visions of what was only hours before float back into his mind.

Well, fuck.

Remembering her kisses on his neck, he releases his hold over her waist and lets his fingers skim over where he thinks the bruise of a hickey must lay.

They aren’t even at their shared apartment, he notes, when he sees the tacky wallpaper and dollar store framed, below average art on the wall.

At least they’re still wearing pants. At least.

He wants to focus on the moment, relax and savour the few seconds he has left with her wrapped together in his arms like she belonged there and ignore the scratchy covers that look like a bus seat from the 90’s. Unfortunately, the headache gets the best of him and he drops into a helter skelter fit of dreams of her and him—mutually exclusive.

Wakefulness primps him awake for the second time and Michelle is sitting up with Peter’s arm still draped on her lap.

“Michelle?” He’s seemingly forgotten the wicked morning he lived out before her.

She slowly turns to face him, back cracking in odd places with the movement. “Jesus Christ, Pete, your neck.” He instinctively winds his hand around it and the tenderness makes him curl his mussed-up brows. “C’mon, let’s get up.”

Once she finishes in the bathroom, Peter goes to relieve himself, but he’s caught dead upon seeing his reflection. His neck looks like he got into another one-on-one with Doc Ock. He’s disgusted until he realizes that the marks belong to MJ’s lips and suddenly, they don’t seem grotesque and sloppy. Their appearance warps around a bit and now Peter is debating on whether or not he should get them as tattoos. _No_ , he trains himself, _that’s fucking weird, dude_.

Coming back out to see Michelle sitting criss-cross apple sauce on the bed in her still shirtless form does nothing to make this easier. He hates it when she’s cute. She’s thumb-wrestling herself which does not seem to have any apparent champion.

“I can’t find my top,” she announces.

“Uhh,” Peter scans the room but comes up unsuccessful. As a peace offering, he hands her his own shirt, crisp with drying sweat and smelling of Mexican beer and Bajan rum. “Here, it’s better than nothing.”

“What about you?” she asks, shyly. Peter hasn’t seen her act shy in years, if ever. Even before, she was never really shy, she just didn’t care to befriend the entire Midtown class of 2019.

“Well, I love to suffer,” he hums pathetically, “but you knew that already.”

Michelle gives him a withering smile and just like his shirt, it’s better than nothing.

“Thanks,” she says, and she tugs it on. Standing, it fits all too well, but Peter knew it would. His clothes always fit her. “I’m gonna order an uber.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll go check out.”

When he’s in the lobby, one the size of a Tupperware box, the grey-haired lady gives him such a tepid and foul stare that its wholly unkind given the morning he’s had. She points to a sign taped to a wall, limp and near falling. _No shirt, no shoes, no service_ , it reads in flaccid Calibri font.

Peter sighs, mouth dry. “Fine,” and he walks over and throws more than enough bills on the table to cover their room.

The baby bell above rings when he trudges out.

Michelle is waiting outside the uber and waves him over. She holds the door open and shoves him in. “You must be freezing.”

The uber driver gives him a once-over. “Good night?” He laughs.

A near sardonic laugh brews out of him. “You don’t know the half of it,” and with every second a sliver of Peter’s heart sinks further into the dark.

Michelle buckles up, tries to make steady eye contact with him, but when it reaches him he breaks it immediately. Maybe it’s irrational, but a grand part of him is guilty each time he looks at her and so he has to subvert his gaze. He can’t believe he forced her into this. He doesn’t remember how it happened, only slants and slots of the night.

“Peter, it’s going to be alright, okay?” She says without an ounce of emotion or a pinch of sympathy. “We were drunk, it was your birthday. Just leave it and stop overreacting.”

“Overreacting?” He hisses, “How-I-if anything I’m underreacting. This is the biggest deal. I don’t even—how can you be so calm?”

MJ looks offended, her eyes slice into narrow slits, “What, is this really the worst thing to ever happen to you?”

Peter pauses. Is it? Not exactly, he supposes. But it is disorienting. With Michelle being the one constant in his life, who suddenly isn’t anymore, it unsettles him. She’s something else now, an undefined variable. He just knows it’s different, the one thing in his life that was unchanging becomes unrecognizable. A year ago, he was engaged to a woman who left him because of the threat of Michelle, and here he is married to the trigger. The world has somehow shifted. All this time he spent watching on the outside and now he’s tossed into the ring with no defenses.

Brave face and big boy pants on, he says “It couldn’t be… We’re going to figure this out though. We have to.”

“Sure, sure.” She hums.

The way she says it is like a time machine, sucking him away from the present and whirling him somewhere else. She said it exactly how she did when Peter said he was fine after Gwen broke off their engagement.

He can see why Gwen did it now, and he can see why MJ was so doubtful of his confidence—or lack thereof—both back then and now. MJ sometimes does that, says things like she already knows the future. And Peter always does this thing where he can’t let go of the past.

Gwen woke up one morning and called it off. Not right away, but after Peter poured Michelle’s tea with a slip of milk before he even thought to pour Gwen’s coffee. Which isn’t to say that she took small things too large at heart, because Peter saw how Gwen had counted these tiny things over months. These microscopic instincts that lead Peter back to Michelle and never towards herself.

He remembers when she asked to speak to him privately right after, and he unknowingly followed her back to his room. He didn’t recognize then that within the hour he’d be left with two strikes of heartbreak all at once. One for Gwen, and the other for, well. Yeah.

It came as a shock, undoubtedly, for a few reasons. First off, Peter and Gwen never fought, not once. People didn’t believe it when they told them, most onlookers promised it would start after marriage, but Peter and Gwen would exchange smiles and nod like they knew they would last. In hindsight, they didn’t know jackshit. Secondly, the feelings he had harboured up and stowed away for Michelle finally began to tumble out from every corner of his life. The dam had broken. It unleashed possibilities that had been held captive in a kingdom of fear.

Gwen was always right. This was yet another instance. She was right—Peter had fallen in love with his best friend. Warm, thick and drenching feelings that he thought were mopped up by Gwen’s comfortable touch began to flood out as Gwen packed up her boxes.

But Peter’s a fighter, if anything, so it wouldn’t make sense that he would let a marriage like that escape him without risking every finger he had to latch onto it. Here he was, fighting back: “Why are you doing this? Haven’t I proved how much you mean to me?”

Gwen never stopped folding her things away, too easily she said, “it was way overdue,” like the words were rehearsed.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong! I have loved you for every second since being with you, and I thought you loved me, too.” Peter felt light-headed.

Quietly, “I still love you, I might never stop.” Her knuckles looked like white pleather in the grips—unnatural and too pale. “That doesn’t change our situation. One day, five, ten, twenty years from now, you’re going to look at me and wish it was her. And we could have kids, and you might wish they had your nose and her eyes, instead of mine. I can’t help but imagine that you would spend all your free moments wondering what could have been, and then maybe this would be what makes you hate me after all. I’m not the stepping stone to your future, I’m just the river you need to cross.”

“That’s not true. You know it. I would never do that. I love you, please,” he protested. “I love you now.” His voice was firm whereas his heart went soft. A yearning was conceived in his heart, and he did not know who it belonged to, who it was made for.

“I know you do,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t love her more.”

“Clearly, I don’t understand what any of this means, ’cause I can’t even see where you get this at all.”

She grew frustrated by his lack of comprehension. Later, when he asked her, Gwen would explain because it hurt more with every time she had to say why. She would tell him to imagine having to convince the love of his life that they are truly in love with someone else, and then at long last he would understand.

“It means I’m tired of competing, Peter!” She fired at him, and he was aghast.

He threw his hands up, both in opposition and surrender. “It was never a competition!”

“Then why am I losing?!” Just then, the always calm, ever composed Gwen Stacy crumpled; tears boiled their way down her face, her veins twisted out like thunder and lightning on her shaking hands, her nose flared like the odour of the room held the season of misery. She dropped the sweater she was holding (May bought it for her, but Peter wouldn’t notice until he replayed the moment over and over again in his head) and fell into Peter’s chest. She pounded her fists on him stubbornly and came up fruitless. “Why am I _losing_?” She sobbed. Her voice would sound hysterical to any other, but to them it sounded like truth.

It did not matter what he said or what he did. Their marriage ended before it had even begun. Gwen had words of Creation. Irreversible fact. If she said it, she meant it, and she would not be swayed. And she was right. Peter was the unwitting fool who had fallen in love with the girl who wasn’t his.

This, now he knew.

Worse yet, as it all was happening, Peter was forced to sit and watch. Because he put up his fight, had his tantrum, and nothing changed. Nothing would change. He was powerless. Just like how he had sat and watched his parents’ flight crash announced on the news, saw his Uncle Ben’s last drawn breath, and now his fiancée packing her boxes. He always does this, sits and watches his life unravel before him. Gwen was going to take it all away with her, beginning with her toothbrush, pyjamas, everything and with no memorabilia left.

Peter blinks it all away.

Michelle falls asleep in her own bed as soon as they return, so quickly that the door to her room is flung open to ricochet off the nickel spring. It swivels open and close and she’s out before he can count to three.

He rolls his neck to loosen his shoulders, lets everything out with one whoosh of breath and his joints swivel around as he limpens. _Happy fucking birthday,_ he thinks.

* * *

He spends most of the day avoiding her, the only contact with life being their cat, Angelou, who kneads bread on his duvet when she stretches her back. But when Michelle hears his voice carry into her room from where he’s on the phone in the kitchen, she stirs out of her bed. They both officially retire from hibernation.

“Uh, Mr. Stark?”

“What’s going to make this phone call worth me waking up at two in the goddamn morning to answer this?” A sore voice grumbles.

“The thing is, I-uhm, so—” he blunders over his words like they are dead tree roots in the dark. “Wait, how is it morning?”

“I’m in Hong Kong, kiddo.”

“Right, okay, sure,” his lips are too fast compared to the speed at which he’s trying to process his thoughts. “Where was I?”

“You weren’t anywhere.” This conversation is so explicitly tedious to him, Peter can tell.

“I don’t know how to say this,” Peter slips out of the hallway lest he burn a hole through the floor with his pacing and onto their balcony. He slides the glass door shut, preferring to keep his humility discrete. “Michelle and I got married last night.” He prepares himself for the worst.

“You and MJ, huh?” Tony observes without any incredulity to spare. Peter looks over to where Michelle is blowing on her too-hot tea. “Took a long while with that one.”

“Are you-you aren’t surprised?”

“Not even a little bit,” he answers, his sound lightening from its post-waking growl into his regular voice through the phone receiver. “Tax purposes—also, you’re in love with her.”

“Mr. Stark!” Peter will forever hate the way the man says things like its simple, because it isn’t at all. This is so incredibly serious and complex. Tony Stark is nothing if not facetious. It isn’t as simple as one plus one, a, b, and c. This is his life. “Mr. Stark, I need your help!” His voice cracks.

“Marriage strife already? And here I thought you wouldn’t need me anymore these days.”

“I need a lawyer. We’re getting a divorce.” It’s especially sad when he hears the remorse through his own ears. Peter says it so grievingly that a bystander would have thought this was the end of a true, deeply felt marriage rather than the sexcapade of 12 hours lost to cheap Irish whiskey.

“What? You just got married,” he says, baffled. Finally, Mr. Stark is showing some semblance of emotion.

“The thing is, I-we got drunk last night, like really drunk, and woke up married. It’s not real. I’m not calling for congratulations, I’m calling because I need a lawyer.”

Tony Stark might have just broken the record for world’s longest sigh. “Look, kid, here’s what I’m going to do: since I am out of town, I’m going to let you sit and marinate in your accidentally on purpose marriage. Give yourself a week to work things out on your own, and if you still need a lawyer when I get back next Monday, then I’ll give you one. Until then: ‘happy wife, happy life.’ Goodnight, champ.”

Peter hears the static click when the call drops from the other end.

He looks to MJ, and he can tell from her tightened face that she wasn’t impressed with what she heard from his side of the conversation. “We can get it annulled, right? Since we didn’t…uh-” How does one phrase this? “Consummate the marriage.”

Michelle’s face contorts into one of disgust. “Is that how it works? God, that’s so medieval.”

He huffs, “I don’t actually know, I saw it in an episode of Friends.”

A pause. A moment of complete and unnerving disbelief. Then, she laughs so breezily that it makes the anchor on his heart lighten, only for it to sink even deeper immediately under the pretenses.

“It’s not that funny, MJ.”

She looks concerned again. “I’m sorry Pete, really I am. But it’s kind of funny, you have to admit.”

No, he wants to say. It would be funny if it were Ned. Or Shuri, or hell—even waking up married to Flash would be funnier. It isn’t easy to laugh it off when this is the world’s way of saying “ _hey, look, you’re a loser, she doesn’t love you, this is fake_ ” and life is rubbing salt into the wound by reminding him that they will never actually be together. Michelle seems to pick up on his inner anguish and she comes over to rub his shoulders, lay her head atop of his so that her chin grazes his ear and everything tickles.

“Oh c’mon, Pete. You know nothing could change how things are between us.” Nail, meet coffin. “Let’s have some fun with this, at least. It could be a great story to tell our kids.”

At this, Peter’s eyebrows flip up and flop about like a fish out of water. MJ realizes what she has said and immediately backtracks, pulls her hands off of him like he was a hot stove. “I mean—not our kids. Your kids, then my kids. Respectively.” She sighs, unsatisfied with her attempt of a save, and the release of breath blows out her bangs only to cover her face even more.

After so many years of friendship, you would think Peter would know her through and through, yet there’s a surprise every day from her little antics that leak out from wherever she tries to hide them. He’s always learning something new about her and as soon as he thinks he knows it all, every single fact, she flips him to the side and stuns him again. To think he could not fall in love with her any bit more, but here he is: one foot deeper.

“I never knew you wanted kids,” he comments once he’s absorbed the spilt information, his eyes study her when he tilts his head back to properly look at her. Perhaps a better word is dissect. His eyes dissect her, slow and ready.

“Depends on with who, but yes. I do.” She says it as if it were a secret, hushed and soft.

Peter isn’t sure which box to file away her truth in, but it stays with him somewhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BABY, IM BACK! hi friends, so, i had a health thing that prevented me from writing so this has been picked up and put down until i got better. i didn't want to post anything until i finished my other wip but i watched ffh last night and i-
> 
> anyway, i missed y'all ! thank u for the crazy amount of support i received while i was away. i read all your comments ten times before bed and three times when i wake up... ily :)))
> 
> also they may or may not bone later, so expect the rating to change


	2. day two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls note the rating change things bout to get steamy and sad ;(

It’s hard for him to pretend everything is normal today, it’s harder when Michelle makes it look easy. But life doesn’t stop for anybody and Peter needs money for his next eng project, so it’s inevitable for him to go asking for MJ’s help like he always does.

“Hey, MJ? When you have the time, do you think you could maybe look over a research proposal for me? We’re reviewing for budget next week and I need to make sure I’m not a fuck-up.”

“No worries, just leave it on my desk before patrol, how ’bout,” she calls from her room.

That night, he slides in through his bedroom window two hours too late. Michelle will have already put herself to bed at this hour, but he sees his draft highlighted, annotated, edited and refined at the foot of his bed. Just like always, he sees the doodles and sketches that leap out of pages and in between lines as he flips through. Some of them odd things he recognizes from around the apartment, others are faces of him and her together. One of him in his old yellow blazer—done so quickly that his jaw line is jagged and his shoulders are too square, and yet it is simultaneously perfect. Lyrics to a song he can’t recognize in loopy and fragmented writing, accompanied by it are the chords on a scale. His heart warms from the outside in, thawing from the brittle midnight air of a burning August in New York and playing witness to a dozen crimes.

Peter takes his time to review her notes and revamp his current work, then files the kaleidoscopic draft into one of three boxes that sit at the foot of his closet. He leaves himself to be thrown on the bed and drift into thought.

He’s a big believer in the art of timing. Timing is everything. Timing is what brought the bite of a radioactive spider to his pinky finger, and is what killed Uncle Ben in the heat of the night, and is what brought him back from the never-ending expanse of the soul stone. Potentially, timing is what keeps him and MJ apart. People have always asked him why they weren’t dating, why they never tried. Truth is, if it hasn’t happened by now, within a time span of almost a decade, probability says it never will. If it was meant to happen, it already would have.

Peter liked her in high school. He thought she might like him too. But then he was stuck in the memories of space and looking death so close in the eye, and before he even got over it, it was graduation. He still liked her in college too, but the ever-bitter Michelle told him and Ned about how she was so done with boys in early September. She told them about how immature they were. And how stupid, and unambitious too. So, he backed off.

And then Brad happened. One weekend, Michelle introduced him to Peter and Ned as her ‘ _friend_ ’ and he had his arm around her shoulder, and he was taller than her, and his clinky and too shiny teeth kept smiling at her. Some other Harvard Business guy who thought he deserved Michelle is all Peter saw.

Peter had missed the starting gun.

Brad and she were off and on all through college and graduate school. It was a love that spanned over years and years but never without interruption.

Peter met Gwen during an internship after fourth year, only a week before the other two went on their third ‘break’. Nothing synced up.

Most recently, Brad asked Michelle to move with him to San Francisco for a job offer, to which she agreed. After packing all her boxes (everything but socks, she said), Michelle received a call from J. Jonah Jameson to leave behind the culture desk and become the new editor of the politics department at the Bugle. Weeks later, when Peter asked, she simply stated, “Matter over mind” and he never forgot it. He hasn’t heard of Brad since.

There were not just handfuls of differences that their two relationships shared. Indeed, it was a metric fuckton. Peter and Gwen were easy like Sunday morning, it was routine and relaxed, and no one ever got hurt. Michelle and Brad fought like they made a dollar for every time they did. They’d break up over the last egg roll and have a screaming match about Brad’s parents. Peter and Gwen were vanilla all around, fluffy and soft in love. Michelle and Brad fought fire with fire and bless Peter’s brain for the ability of blocking out trauma. Otherwise he would still be able to hear, in the very back of his head, all the ways Michelle would scream Brad’s name. In hate and fear, in pleasure and devotion.

They could not be more opposite in how they loved. Though Peter did it silently, that much is true.

This is what he thinks of on the commute to work. Mr. Stark let him work as a bioengineer for Stark Industries after finishing only two years at MIT, and Ned tagged along for an internship while he’s finishing off his last year at NYU.

Peter brings it up as casually as possible during his lunch break with Ned. Ned, being the most theatrical person he knows, took it as well as Peter thought he would. Which is to say, after the most _obvious_ cheering in what is supposed to be a _professional_ work environment, Ned declared that today would be the day he hands in his two weeks’ notice. Noticing the look of bafflement on his friend’s face, Ned discloses that he will need all the time he can afford in order to train and become world’s best uncle.

If one were to look past Peter’s awkward disgruntlement at the reaction, they could possibly see the phantom smile endeared by his best friend’s wholesome antics.

Ned soothes no sorrows, but he does distract him from them.

“So, if you had to choose: Shuri or I for best man?”

It’s kind of nice to shine a positive back on to this whole marriage complexity. “Shuri, duh. And before you get offended, you’re legally ordained, so like, obviously you’re the official.”

“Hmm, deal.” Ned taps his chin, “Wait, if you get Shuri then who will be MJ’s maid of honour?”

“Ned, I thought we were speaking in hypotheticals, not my actual current atrocity of a marriage.” He shoves at his friend’s shoulder and paws off a fry from his plate.

“Oh c’mon,” Ned whines, “at least play along! I haven’t had wedding fever since Betty and I got married.”

“Dude, the wedding was three months ago.”

“Unfair, three months is plenty long.”

“Sure, sure.” Peter’s starting to sound like someone, recently. “Liz.”

“’Scuse you, what?” Ned tends to think so loud he can’t hear the people around him. Peter thinks this might be a textbook example of it.

“Liz,” he repeats, the answer is too easy. “Michelle would ask Liz to be her maid of honour.”

“Damn, yeah, that makes sense.” They both forget about her sometimes, since they only see her once or twice a year at most. Ned chews up a handful of fries in haste and Peter swears he can hear it slip all the way down his esophagus. Peter frowns in distaste. “I’ll start working on the vows tonight.”

“What the fuck? No.” Peter refutes, sheepish. He is blushing at the edges.

“It doesn’t have to be for you and MJ! It could be you and anybody up there,” Ned foretells.

Peter flicks a fry which lands on Ned’s collar, just to piss him off before their break is over. Peter’s eyes singe around the corners as they narrow. “How thoughtful, Ned, a one-size-fits-all on my future wedding ceremony.”

Ned snorts.

Quietly, Peter speaks. “You know, you never wrote vows for me when I proposed to Gwen.”

Concern immediately sweeps Ned’s features. “That’s different,” he says.

“Maybe.” Their lunch break is over anyway, so Peter doesn’t feel so bad when he gets up from the table before finishing his meal. Besides, he hasn’t been so hungry in recent days.

* * *

Michelle texts him that she won’t be home until late but warns him not to wait.

Which means shit all, because of course he has to wait up. He couldn’t sleep if he tried. His senses seem to stay on hyperdrive when she’s away in the middle of the night. So, here he is, laying in the dark but still able to see every detail of the room at two in the morning. He dressed up and did that whole spandex saviour ordeal for a few hours tonight, but ever since _that_ happened he seems to be more trouble than help on the streets when he gets stuck in his head.

“Peter?” She calls for him when she notices him lounging on the couch, lasering bullet holes into the ceiling.

“Hunh?” Peter murmurs.

“I told you not to stay up for me.” She stands at his head so that her face is upside down and winds her fingers through his hair. The ends and roots of her own hair are damp with rain and the middle frizzes up to look like an extravagant bouquet.

“Can’t sleep when you’re gone,” he whispers, eyes fluttering closed at her touch. He can’t see her lean in, but he can feel the shift.

Now this isn’t the first time they have kissed, not at all, but this is the first time he’s fully present for it, can truly bask in what is kissing MJ. Her lips are soft and wet from her habit of licking them. And they are so much warmer than her frozen to bone fingertips. She splays her hand out over his abdomens, drags up to rest on his chest and along with it the hem of Peter’s shirt. Fingers are still cold from the poor weather, but her palms remain warm, too.

Kissing Michelle is like an extension of self. Some part of him is unhinged and realigned and somewhere far along the way he sees himself breaking the ribbon of the finish line. So, this is what winning feels like.

Better yet, she doesn’t stop kissing him. Peter takes his victory lap, and behind his eyes he sees pink and white, even though the room is damn near black. He senses her breath exhale from her nose, and it fans out off of his chin then all down his neck.

“This doesn’t count,” she says as she removes herself from him. “It doesn’t count if we’re married, right?”

“Hmm?” Peter’s eyes are still closed as he swims in the lasting seconds of her sweet kiss just now.

“If we have sex tonight, it doesn’t count.”

Peter sits up abrupt enough that his forehead clocks Michelle’s chin. “Ow, ugh, sorry.”

“But you heard me.”

“Yeah,” He rubs his hands at his temple, confused, “Yeah.”

“And so?”

He blinks. It’s like playing deal or no deal, but after winning they burn all the money as the show airs. Even though he understands that, he can’t really deny the initial opportunity—a million dollars is still a million dollars. “It doesn’t count,” Peter calculates.

The air crackles around them until Michelle twists and turns their position so that she’s straddling his upright figure on couch. The immediacy behind her kisses says that she’s thought of this already. Her kissing him isn’t news to her, it feels like she’s studied and thought of it all day and now she’s killing the exam. It’s premeditated murder, is what it is.

Her hands curl into his hair and they finally seem to warm up. She touches the back of his neck loosely, like the moment could escape her lest she be gentle. Peter vices her arm like the moment was never his in the first place.

To distract himself from the fact, he must close his eyes to escape the entrancing horizon that is her own. But then he relapses. As his vision absconds him, his sense of touch heightens. Instinct, gravity, fate, heaven or hell—he’s not sure which to blame it on when his lips drift to blanket hers.

She receives him well, anticipates his movements. Just like their lives that are perfectly in sync and revolve carefully around the other’s, their bodies do the same. Her lips tuck so gently into his own, they slot and match up and the tempo is unchanging. When he feels her hum against his mouth, he opens enough so that his tongue can taste whatever of her that she is willing to offer. He does so cautiously, in case this would serve as a reminder to her that what they are doing is wrong. Peter thinks that any movement, if not performed with utmost precision, would be enough to wake her up and have her realize that Peter is not what she wants, he is just what is here. Nothing would burn him so scathingly than for Michelle to open her eyes, completely apathetic, tell him to get off her. Worse off, she could say that they couldn’t be friends anymore, either.

And yet, he kisses her anyway. Peter presents himself open and giving, so vulnerable at her selection. But it’s worth it, he would choose to give himself to her like this at any time at all so long as she remains with him. She opens her mouth just enough to feel him lick into her, drag the tip of his tongue just at the edge of the roof of her mouth. Michelle purrs at the sensation and her sighs prove to be the end of his world as he knows it.

Michelle’s nails scrape down his back with gentle zeal and in their wake, he feels like she has carved him open. In all the instances that he has pictured this, he had never thought that her hands would wander so much. They touch him everywhere at once. Her long fingers swirl over him as if she was airing out red wine in a glass. Turning and turning until he’s dizzied with it.

“Bedroom,” she tells him.

“Hm?” Peter is deaf under the rush of blood flushing his eardrums of reception.

“Take me to the bedroom,” she requests again.

Peter’s eyes darken as he hoists her around his waist and stumbles down the hall and into her room. Dipping her onto her bed, he watches her lean back on her elbows, asking to be devoured. She slowly begins to unbutton her top, never breaking eye contact with him.

Her hair is just beginning to dry.

He grows impatient, the awe turning into a wild hunger. He works the buttons from the bottom up to meet her in the middle, all while lavishly taking her lips to his own. MJ lets him slide the shirt from her long arms, and he unclasps her bralette in butchered and ecstatic motions.

Her nipples are already hard from exposure to the cool air and rain. The wet receipts of rain reflecting slivers of blue light from the digital clock beside them. Her breasts are small enough that they can fit into his each of his palms perfectly, yet still supple enough that he can’t quite fit one into his mouth in entirety.

She continues to fist at his hair and the taut pulling causes him to groan around her breast, and he can hear a short gasp of surprise.

He continues his tonguing trail down her body and kisses the dimples of her narrow hip bones as he undoes her pants, dragging them off her. “Please,” she implores with long and steadying breaths, lifting her hips to bring her closer to his mouth again, but he still looks up to her dewy face, unsure. “Peter, please.”

Peter takes his time to appreciate the view in front of him. The deep, grayscale lace of her boyshorts look much more different on her than when they get mixed into his laundry. He must spend too much time longing at her beauty, because she whispers, “Peter,” again, quiet and soft like it was a secret that he should not have heard. Michelle’s voice interrupts his captivation by her long and lean body, and when he trails back up to her eyes, they twinkle black in the dark, doe-ish and alluring. Peter has seen nothing that could compare to the hope that her eyes expel, hope for him, hope for them. What are the chances that this is true?

He hooks his thumbs underneath her underwear, sliding them off slow enough that he can feel the puckering of her skin when his trimmed nails rake a path down her thighs. He follows that movement all the way down, kissing softly every few inches, taking his time. The flow of air that expels from his breathing stipple her skin, and when he looks up, she is holding her breath. Her chest is frozen in time, no lungs expanding for the sake of living. Save for the rapid beating of her heart, that which Peter can hear through his elevated senses, she looks statuesque—unmoving and fragile.

Peter lifts her legs with one arm, and finally peels off her panties that snap off her ankles just to throw them recklessly into the dark. Upon the feeling of nothingness—nothing but Peter, at least—atop her, Michelle grips the sheets in coils.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’ve got you.”

“I know,” she says. “I know you do.” Her figure ceases to relax despite their words of comfort.

Peter leans back up, waiting for her to meet his lips. And she does, then she completely restarts. Finding her bravery once more.

Her fingers loosen around the sheets and find their way into his curls, and it feels like they’re on the same page again.

“Is this okay?” He asks, when he slides a hand down to trace along her bikini line.

She nods, bereft of speech.

Peter continues until two fingers slip between the cusp of her, just skimming the wetness from her entrance up to her clitoris. Michelle is capable of breath now, husking in brisk gulps of air. Her grip on his hair tightens, ridiculously so as he has hardly done anything to her yet.

He takes one last beat before bringing his face down to work at her, spreading her folds apart so he can better taste her. Slowly, like the sand that falls through an hourglass, Peter laps into her and relishes in the few moments he has left of being a husband.

Over minutes, her intakes of air turn from frantic into mewls of pleasure. He takes that as a welcoming sign, and gently prods a finger into her. It slips in with ease and the feeling of her around him swells Peter. He adds another finger and quickens the pace until she is nothing but the clipped moans she’s making.

“Wait, wait.” She warns him, “Want to come with you in me.” Peter groans at the thought.

“MJ,” he rasps, coming up for air, “You can’t just say shit like that.” He wipes at the sweat that has beaded at his temple.

“So? I mean it.” She opens the drawer beside them and passes him a foil packet. “Hurry up,” she commands, before tossing an elbow over her eyes as she sinks back to wait. Peter quickly composes himself before positioning himself above her, humorously tipping her elbow away so she’s forced to see him, her arm being the only thing that stands between them. She spreads her legs to welcome him.

He kisses her elbow.

In one full stride, he bottoms out and he has to take a moment just to collect himself because the feeling of being inside her is indescribable. It has the quality of pleasure that usually comes with shame, but here it very well could be the proudest moment of his life. He rocks into her slowly, adjusting to the tightness. MJ, in turn, pushes herself more flush against him, slotting into place more comfortably and allowing him even deeper. Her sighs return and she puffs against his neck between open-mouthed kisses.

Upon noticing that her hand has wandered from his neck to rub at her clit, he swats it away with his own. He becomes jealous of her for touching herself like that, exactly in the way he has pictured for years. When he thumbs at her in loose circles, her eyes squeeze shut in pure pleasure. The problem is, from being so close to her, he can’t fit both her pretty, shameless face into the same frame as to where he sees his length disappear into her. His eyes are forced to tear from where she bites her lips to hold back sounds and back to where his thumbs flicks over her centre.

The only solution for him is to lean back so that he’s fucking her on his knees for leverage. The coolness of the air away from her washes over him immediately. Her long body forms a bridge with her back arched and her legs wrapped tightly around him. Now he can fit both the picture of where her head slants back while she grabs at her own breasts for refuge, twisting in the blue light of the room, and where he gets to be the source of her euphoria. He will give everything he can so long as she keeps taking. The new position for this adjustment changes the angle of where he hits inside of her, and Michelle springs up in a gasp. Peter has to catch her lest she lose balance. Seeing her like this—desperate and frantic—is so vividly different from their normal lives. MJ isn’t clumsy or tipsy or swimming in spirits. She would never need to lean on Peter like he was a railing, climb him like a tree. But here she is, clawing at his back like she’s trying to escape a world away from him.

In theory, this should just be sex. A way for them to take flight from their frustrations and extract the anxiety from this equation. Except it doesn’t feel like just sex. Not when Michelle is looking at him so softly—heavy lidded with fluttering lashes. Not when her hands run through his hair, when the left twists at the ends of a wavy lock, when the right comes down to trace his jaw with the back of her fingers. The sum of it all makes his eyes sting, tickles at his nose in the same way that the rolling credits of a sad movie would. It is unlawful for him to become so emotional over something that’s meant to be nothing. Even though he knows that this is a one-time thing, that it won’t ever happen again, he blindly pretends that it’s real. He woefully ignores the fact that this is merely a coping mechanism for her.

He steadies her, but she never fully relaxes. Instead her eyes remain wild, hair untamed and still wet, and she’s panting with eagerness. Legs that are wrapped around him don’t loosen in tension, in fact, by straddling him she is able to grip him even closer, bury him impossibly deeper.

Peter keeps one hand on her back to keep her in place on his lap, but the other hand returns to rub at her clitoris. In turn, Michelle tangles her hands in Peter’s hair, crosses her arms so that his head tucks into her chest. He can feel the ends of her curls trickle down onto his bare back. They lick at him in ways she couldn’t reach.

“Peter,” she begs into his ear, “’ve wanted this for so long, Peter.”

His mind short-circuits.

“’m gonna need you in me all the time, now.” The thought of this happening again shocks him. So, it’s not a one-time thing. Game changer, he thinks. Knowing that this won’t be the first and last time, he no longer needs to treasure it, he doesn’t have to play it perfect and soft in his head. It’s not making love to her anyway, why should it feel like that for him?

He uses his exceptional strength to throw her up and down on his lap. Reaching around her back to grasp her opposite hip, he uses it like a handle to fuck her without hesitation. Peter pumps into Michelle harder and faster than before. His knees serve as better leverage to really and truly drive into her the way she deserves.

In a violent fit of elation, he begins to teethe at her neck, nip at it until the skin pebbles, until her panting moans more closely resemble full cries. Her abdomen spasms as she rocks back onto him, and he can feel her ring of muscle flutter around him as she comes.

Through the moans, he hears a tampered “Peter, look at me.” He barely registers it through his tunnel vision, Michelle has to grab his hair and pull him away from where he’s looking down. When he takes his eyes off from where he is kneading at her clit, his eyes immediately catch the sight of hers that radiate in the little light that exists in this room. Her dilated eyes pour over him. They cut through the fog of lust and invade his heightened senses. Peter knows that he must appear dishevelled—thoroughly ravished—but he doesn’t care, because when Michelle tilts his face up, scrapes her nails through his hair and she smiles at him in that way, well, excuse him for believing once again that it is real. She tugs at his hair and balances her forehead on his. “Just wanna see your face,” she tells him so sweetly.

And he falls in love with her all over again. It’s something just short of a curse.

The tempo changes, then, because Michelle squirms her way out of his grasp, takes the hand that squeezes her hips and holds it with one of her own. Peter no longer vaults into her, but it isn’t any less intense when he takes her in steadily, circles them together and joins their bodies flush at the hips. He pumps into her slow and careful, as if she is just as fragile as himself.

Michelle guides their joined hands up to her lips, draws their faces two inches apart so that she can kiss the union of their linked fingers, kisses Peter from fingertip to wrist. He has never felt so valued in his life, he thinks, when her eyelashes tickle his knuckles and she blinks up at him.

The price of this instant, so outstanding and yet immeasurable, locks him up. He releases a guttural sound when he finally comes and he stutters out the last few pumps. In the softest of moments, he feels barbaric, like he could never, _ever_ be able to give her the justice she deserves. That twinge in his lungs that tells him he needs to move, that there is too much stillness under his skin and his bones begin to itch, it agitates their resting embrace.

He stands up, removes the condom and ties it up for disposal, picks up his shirt on the way out to his room. Michelle interrupts his mission: “Where are you going?”

He can’t very well say that he is going to his room so that he can maybe cry or watch a crap-ass sitcom for consolation. “Just getting a drink,” he replaces.

“You’re coming back though, right?” It is so earnest and shy, something so unlike her usual self that the hairs on Peter’s arms stand on edge.

“I’m always coming back,” he promises. He does go to get a drink, brings Michelle a glass of water too, and gives her the t-shirt he was holding to wipe the wetness between her legs down for comfort. She takes them both gratefully. Peter turns around to shield himself from the sight of her using his shirt to clean herself up between her thighs and she heads to the washroom. It’s sick, yeah, but some part of Peter is proud that this is what he can give her.

“Thanks for not making this weird,” she tells him, after returning. He’s sitting on the edge of her bed, one knee bouncing like it might spring off and run away. She places one last, firm kiss onto his lips. It’s reassuring and so—domestic. It’s casual. MJ takes his hand and tucks them under her duvet, and they fall asleep together, fingers interlocked between them like they physically can’t let this go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for another read!!


	3. day three

Peter wakes up from suffocating on some sort of linen blend that smells too much like coconut product.

“What the fu—” he hacks out, shuttered by surprise. Then, interrupted with a kiss.

Michelle is perched on him, straddling with her thighs on either side. With a pillow grasped between both her hands, he sees “Sorry, I was trying to see if it worked while you were sleeping.”

“If what worked?” He puts a tentative grasp over a hip of hers. She’s wearing a _You Matter._ hoodie, and nothing else it seems.

“Your Peter Tingle, duh.”

His cheeks heat like glass under the sun, warm and clear as day. “I… I don’t know which Peter Tingle you’re talking about…” He trails off, pointedly looking at where her body is sitting on top of his own, and then quickly away as if _he_ was the one invading the other’s privacy.

“Oh,” she says. “I was thinking about the spider one. But, well, maybe I’ll ask that other Peter Tingle question another day.”

“Oh my god, can we please stop calling it that?” He rubs at the light stubble that’s grown overnight along his chin.

“You don’t like that?” She teases, “I thought that was your favourite. Everybody knows how much you like your Peter Tingle—”

“Stop!”

“Every day, Peter Tingle this, Peter Tingle that. Blah, blah—” Peter muffles her with his hand stifling her lips. She licks his hand without hesitation.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Peter wipes his hand on her sheets, his face shrinking up with disturbance.

“What, you think I have cooties all of the sudden?”

“Cooties are not a joke, MJ. Millions of Americans suffer every ye—” His attempt at acting stern dies into the second line when she claps a hand over his own mouth. MJ rolls her eyes, fake-annoyed. It takes Peter another second before he’s brave enough to re-enact her previous crime.

She bursts into a fit of giggles and wipes her hand on the sheets as well, and mutters “Yuck, what dat mouf do?” under her breath.

“You’re so gross,” Peter tells her, but it sounds a bit more like admiration rather than disgust.

She kisses him in truce and runs a finger along his jaw. “You’re scratchy,” she states, and finally hops off of him so he can shave before work.

When he’s running the almost dull blade across his skin, his eyes glaze over himself in the mirror. He doesn’t recognize himself. First, he never gets that blond-in-sunlight stubble that only grows only at the corners of his mouth and at the dip of his chin. It never gets to the point that it is at now, at least. He’s been so wrapped up in all things Michelle that he hasn’t even taken a look at himself. His cheeks and chest are flushed, and there are soft, near-faded marks. Just seeing them, he can remember the delicate ‘puh’s of sound that Michelle’s full lips made in contact with his neck.

After he rinses off the last of the shaving cream and runs his wet hands through his hair, the droplets swim down him the rifts of his muscles and patter out when they absorb into the cotton of his drawstring waist band. Even face to face with himself, he can’t discern if he looks better or worse than before. To be fair, ignoring the inner turmoil, this is perhaps the happiest he’s been in his whole life, and the most satiated he could ask for. But then, Peter still looks like… nothing. He sees right through him and its almost as if the mirror is really just another window.

MJ interrupts the oncoming monsoon of languor with a conclusive, “Coffee’s ready!”

When he sits on one of the bar stools, Michelle places a mug with too hot coffee and too much sugar in front of him. She looms behind him and reaches around his waist to button his shirt up for him, hands carefully explorative. He’s never felt so at home before. And, to think, that this could have been forever—once upon a time. After hopping onto the counter beside him, MJ picks away at last night’s Chinese food for breakfast. He can’t help but gaze at her blissfully collected demeanor.

That early morning glow of simultaneous exhaustion and elation burns down into your average Tuesday. Peter has collected his things and the clock tells him that if he waits any longer he will be late, and he’s tying his shoes at the door when things get sticky.

It’s a bit strange, “Hey, I’m leaving for work now, babe!” He announces. _Jesus._ He can hear the pitter-patter of her dropping her chopsticks from the kitchen. So, she heard him. Great. Why did he say that? How did he say that? A massive, massive Freudian slip.

Thinking that there’s really no way to get out of that, then maybe he will conveniently have to stay late at the headquarters to get ahead on another project today. Peter is definitely not one to confront his embarrassing moments. He’s known to let them tide over and to remember them in bed to cringe seven years from now.

* * *

Peter comes home to Angelou wrapping her tail around his ankles and Michelle emptying the dishwasher.

“Hey, are you doing anything tonight?” Michelle inquires in the tone of voice that means she is going to ask Peter for a favour.

He wasn’t, but then he remembers the last time she asked this question, and he had to put on his mask to break into the Daily Bugle building so that he could hand in an article that she wrote too late. That was piss-his-pants stressful. He’d rather have another building fall on him than to have to face an angry J. Jonah Jameson.

“For why?” he asks hesitantly.

“Liz is back in town and she wants to meet for dinner, you game?”

He hasn’t even told May about his not-marriage marriage, he can’t fathom having to tell his first high school crush about quasi-marrying the love of his life. “I…guess?”

“I’m taking that as an enthusiastic yes,” she deliberates, continuing to put dishes away from the drying rack. “Be ready to leave here quarter to eight.”

“Sure thing,” he murmurs. Peter’s still getting used to pretending this is normal. He’s not quite sure how Michelle does it.

While they’re prepping to go—well, Michelle is prepping to go, because she can’t find her ID, and Peter is sitting on the floor by the door with a lint roller in one hand and a cat in the other—Peter feels a shiver down his spine.

“Moth,” He announces.

“Huh?” She asks, hearing stunted by the walls between them.

“Moth!” He calls again, a bit more frantic this time.

She pulls around the doorframe and peers into the room. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she prompts. At the sight of Peter holding the lint roller like light saber and a sooty bug that flits around the entrance light, Michelle scoffs. He’s conveniently using Angelou as a shield.

It’s quite the secret, but New York’s finest hero is terribly, awfully, embarrassingly afraid of moths. They’re dusty and fly so erratically that his spidey-senses don’t work as well as they ought to, and it kind of fucks him up. Michelle is his best defence. In fact, she’s fantastic. They make quite the duo together. He fights intergalactic terrorists and bank robbers, and she fends off things that end with ‘oths’ and start with ‘m’.

She grabs the lint roller from his hand and nudges him to the side. After tearing off a sheet to reveal the prime sticky acreage kept underneath, it’s wrapped well around her fingers. It’s not so much the first swing that catches it, but rather the half-swing on the way back that clips it to the tackiness of the paper. “There,” she says, balling up the sheet and tossing it into the bin, before facing him again. She fixes his collar and her hands swim to either side onto his shoulders, resting for enough time to not be entirely inconsequential. Which is to say, Peter definitely noticed her pause. Funny, that only days ago he would not have given this another thought.

“Thanks,” he tells, sheepish.

“This is a prime example as to why T’challa is the better superhero.”

“Shut _up_.” Peter laughs and drags a clammy palm across his brow bone. “I swear, God put you on this earth to humble me.”

Now that the bug is slain and the time has come, Michelle asks, “Ready to go, babe?” and Peter feels like an anvil has fallen on his head cartoonishly. His face swells up into the red of a dozen wilting roses and his mouth feels like he’s feasting on stiff linen. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a thing now, by the way.”

“Oh,” he stalls, “okay.”

“Try that again,” she commands, tilting her head to peer down at him, poking harmless fun.

Peter smiles with a sweet shyness. “Okay, babe.” He chuckles, too.

“Good boy,” she returns his smile, receipt and all.

* * *

When they get to the restaurant, Liz is already sitting there in the umber lighting, negroni in hand. Introductions go by, nuptials announced. And in the oddest fashion, Michelle chooses to eliminate the truth from the story. Rather than explaining their drunk endeavours, Michelle frames it like they simply fled and wed. Who is Peter to correct her anyway?

Embarrassing is not frantic enough a word to describe Peter in the moment, because it’s one thing when people stay silent, gather the situation and let Peter off easy to pine in the dark. It’s an entirely other thing when Liz tells Michelle (to her face, nonetheless!) these exact words: “MJ, when you told me over the phone about you and Peter, I for real lost it. Called Cindy ASAP, and then she lost her mind. Have you told any of the debate team? I swear, they’ve actually been clocking this ’cause Peter’s been in love with you for like, half of forever.” And that’s the kill shot.

MJ so abruptly turns her body that her spine snaps up and cracks. Skimming his face, reading his thoughts, studying the growing blush on his cheeks—Peter thinks she hasn’t observed him this closely since high school. She’s openly curious, and her long eyelashes frame her molten brown eyes. Her mouth is just barely ajar, like she is still practicing to see what the words she wants to say before she actually says them. Beyond words that could be said, the look on her face tugs him right back into the past and he remembers the exact moment in senior year when he saw this same look she’s giving him now and he thought yeah, she’s it for me. It’s only ever going to be Michelle.

Continuing, “I’m absolutely baffled that you didn’t tell me earlier. I mean, yeah, elope or whatever, but call us at least before the honeymoon. Otherwise it’s just selfish.” Liz shifts her glare on to Peter. “And you! This is the biggest deal to ever happen to you.”

Peter silently agrees.

The monologue treads forward, no room between words for either of the couple to get a single syllable in. “God knows how long you’ve been waiting for this, I couldn’t even count the years. Something between five and ten, surely. I’m honestly so happy for you, Peter, you get to spend the rest of your life with someone you are so in love with.” She sighs and folds her hand dotingly, but Michelle’s back remains rigid. Her discomfort is contagious. “Alright, enough with that. You guys look like your heads will explode, but I guess that’s what you get for a city hall marriage, huh. Anyway, how’s work?”

“Work is good,” Michelle replies on an exhale, and things don’t quite feel normal again, “I’ve got a new article tackling ex-con voting rights.”

Dinner pushes off with only minimal distress, but Peter still can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s wrong. Michelle keeps giving him sidelong glances and her skin is pale and haunting. All through appies and entrées, her knuckles breed white while her jaw juts out sharply and cuts the thick air, and so of course Peter can’t help but try to help. He tentatively places his hand on her knee, locks an ankle around her own.

Straightaway, her shoulders relax following a dusty exhale. Long fingers hover over Peter’s before circling his wrists like a featherlight anchor.

She doesn’t acknowledge it any further, but Peter knows her, if anything, and he knows that this has helped.

* * *

After, when Peter is paying the bill, Michelle shoves a handful of dinner mints into his back pocket. He squirms at the wandering touch and he can hear Liz snicker. He hasn’t blushed like this in front of Liz since sophomore homecoming, he believes, and the thought makes his ear twitch.

The car is already started and warmed by the time he gets to it and Michelle is removing her heavy boots to drive. Not even ten minutes pass until she breaks the silence of a smooth road together with a hybrid. “Hey, Peter? I’m going to tell you something.” His gaze shifts to meet hers in the rear-view mirror, but she slickly averts his gaze. Her lips purse and he can tell she is trying her hardest not to pick at them like he has caught her doing so many times before.

“Go for it,” he prompts, concerned.

Her hands don’t leave the wheel, sitting stiffly at 10 and 2. Her eyes don’t leave the road. “It was my idea.”

“Pardon?”

“I made you marry me. It was my idea. This is all my fault.”

“MJ, c’mon. You didn’t make me do anything.”

“No, really, Pete. I told you to marry me, that night.”

“Michelle,” he sighs. Her name escapes his lips like the last drop of honey in a bottle—syrupy, slow, wrung out. “You never make me do anything. When you tell me to do something, I do it because I want to do it for you. It’s never because I’m forced to.”

She remains unconvinced. “This is different.”

A hand of his slides over her thigh to bracket her knee for the second time tonight, “I’ll prove it to you one day,” a beat, then: “babe,” he tags on for good measure. Fingers loosely toy with the fringe of the rips in her jeans.

She never replies.

It’s quiet all until Peter unlocks the door to their apartment and is immediately thrown against it upon entering. Michelle invades his space and their teeth click with the force that which she kisses him with.

After all, Peter is just a man. He can’t say no to the best sex he’s ever had, with the best woman he’s ever known. If someone is addicted to a drug, and they never go out to buy it, but they happen to find it without effort or currency on their doorstep every day, is it really their fault for taking it? Fortune has conspired for him to fall fatal to Michelle. It’s only natural.

He’s lost in the small breaths between their kisses. The tongue that dips between his lips and begs for entrance is wholly unearthly and twisted and kind. Her touch is an impetuous thing. It’s unthinking and hazes his vision, befuddles him so much so that he has no rationale to tell him that perhaps the kiss is a sordid act, one that he should be punished for, not instantly rewarded. And it’s that case of immediate gratification that presses him harder against the door and says this is all for you. Take the world.

“I wanna suck you off,” she says, undeterred by introversion.

Peter’s mind runs wild. “What the fuck,” he curses.

She huffs out a laugh and it warms his already hot cheeks. “Is that a yes or a no?”

In disbelief, “Yes, always a yes.” He plucks at the hem of his shirt to cool the furnace that is his chest. Bubbles of cool air swoop at his skin helplessly.

MJ wastes no time to drop to her knees.

“Wait,” he interrupts.

He is given a most disappointed glare.

“The key,” and stumbling, Peter stretches around to grapple the key out, but he can’t quite see it what with his eyes so carefully trained on MJ and the evil glint she has in the moonlight. He still is reaching blind and the cool metal of the doorknob turns warm from the amount of times he’s brushed past it, elbow awkwardly crooked and out of reach of the actual key.

She sighs. After rising up from her knees, she is able to knick the key out with ease. MJ tosses it somewhere into the darkness and the door closes again when she pushes him into it, with one long, measured kiss on the way before she settles back down again.

Her hands race straight to his belt and undoes it in what could potentially be record-breaking time, her fingers working with the steadiness of a classically trained tailor. She palms the outline of his cock and mouths around it, lets the warmth of her small pants envelop him in tease. After careful inspection, her eyes trace upwards and she eats up his wonderous stare. In excessive effort, she mouths at him over the cotton of his boxers. Peter chokes on a sigh and he can feel her cheeks tighten from holding back a grin while Michelle laves over the swell. She draws her thumbs into his shorts and pulls them down just enough so that his half-swollen cock snaps out of it.

Suddenly, Peter is very aware of how on display he is. Something like insecurity is rolling at the back of his mind. Before it was a wet, brazen thrash of limbs that was less about the visuals and more closely followed the single sensation of touch. Here, MJ has her eyes crossed just from examining his growing erection so closely. She licks her lips, hand slowly caressing from his base to up, up, and not quite the tip. MJ is only using her fingertips as they slide up but never back down, just a guiding stroke, so teasing. Bringing her hand up she splays it across his lower abdomen, letting it bloom with greed and pushing up his hem so she can admire the bonds of muscle. “I love your body,” she whispers as if they weren’t already alone, her warm breath making his dick jump. “You are the sexiest man in every room.” Insecurity folds into composedness, and his back straightens with added esteem. The room gets brighter as his pupils dilate, letting him see the completely sincere and enticing Michelle on her knees, asking for him. When her eyes come back to meet his, and it’s clear to both that there is no possibility of Peter ever being harder than this for the rest of his life, she finally tightens her grasp.

MJ spits on her other hand just to get some lax on the pull, her mouth finally meeting the bare skin. Peter squeezes his hands into fist, and she just keeps licking away at his head, uncaring that he is crumbling away by the second. When the smooth surface of her thumb nail traces up his length, the sensation is so new to Peter that he bucks up into it and he accidently pushes himself another two inches deeper into her mouth.

MJ moans around him.

“Fuck,” he curses, “Fuck, MJ, I’m so sorry.”

She pops off to reassure, “No, it’s okay.” After she wipes the accumulating saliva at the corner of her mouth, she reveals that she actually kind of liked it. “Do you think…”

“Huh?” Peter blunders, already love-drunk.

“Fuck my face,” she finally says. “I want you to fuck my face.”

His fists tighten to the point that he can feel the crescent indents of his blunt nails run deeper into the tissue. “I don’t know,” he commends, because he really doesn’t know. With Michelle everything feels so new again and he finds himself having to relearn all the basic mechanisms that come with not hurting the non-arachnid woman he is with. “I don’t know if I can control myself like that, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Who said anything about controlling yourself?” She quips, a smile peeking in the blue tinted light of an empty apartment. “Please, Peter?”

She’s literally begging him.

All of his restraint trickles out of him and he is left tucking Michelle’s hair behind her ear, so aware of how fragile she is. “Okay,” he agrees. Once she has lined him up to be flush with her mouth, she waits for Peter to make the first move. Tentatively, he allows himself to slip past those cruel lips which look magenta in the undulating lights that come along with midnight. He can hear her breathe steadily, like she’s training herself.

Growing impatient at Peter’s faltering pace, she brings it upon herself to dip lower until he’s as close to her throat as he can be without her forcing it. As saintly as ever before, Michelle lets Peter take a moment to adjust to the feeling before moving anymore, and now it’s as she likes it, with him beginning to rear into her. The movements are still slow and rather brief, but over time they become more deliberate and forceful. There are small hiccups of air that escape her mouth as she sucks his cock with each inward thrust and spit and pre-cum seep out the corners of her lips. To be candid, it is the dirtiest and fairest sight of them all. He finally allows himself to weave a hand into her hair for both an anchor to reality and also to the pleasure. By way of her moans vibrating over his cock, and her eyes rolling back into her head, he figures she likes that, and tugs her hair even harder. He’s able to keep their momentum from escaping as he frames her impossibly still while he bores into her deeper than before.

When he closes his eyes, overwhelmed by the ecstasy that comes along with the release, she exists behind his eyelids. He squeezes his eyes shut so tightly that her face blooms into a concoction of a thousand colours, one by one taking over the other across the inches of her glorious features while she swallows around him. She pulls off just as he’s nearing the edge, and cool air that hits the still wetness of his length makes him shudder.

“Want you,” she pauses for air, “to come in me,” another breath, “instead.”

Peter’s head balloons up in heat. He flips them so that she is the one who is pinned, trapped into his demanding hold. In hopes of being half as good, one third as tempestuous, and a quarter of sexy as she was, he lavishes her with long kisses. The two sets of lips meeting for what could be seconds or minutes, even the gods would not know. “We need a condom,” he says, and before he can even loosen his grip on her thighs, she interrupts the intermission.

“I’m clean,” looking at him with earnest. “And on the shot,” she adds.

Peter can feel his throat instinctually rumble at the thought of coming in her raw. He isn’t even able to voice words back to her, you know, like a human being. She raises her brows, inquisitive.

“Anyway, are you gonna fuck me, or what?”

Peter rolls his still shining eyes, as enamoured with her nerve as he was almost a decade ago. “It’s the least I could do, now isn’t it?” His bones begin to feel like his own again. 

A shift to her neck, to nip and toy below her ears. Veins splay across his hands like the slender ribs that run throughout a leaf as he clenches at the soft valley between her thighs and her bottom, and she gives a quiet yelp in surprise. It gives pride to Peter, who addresses the sound with fervent and more confident kisses, returning to her lips to swallow up the following gasps. Her signals of pleasure conform, like a dropped shard of glass with a crackle that is encompassed by warm, deadening sand into less of a thud and more of a puff of air—a sharp yelp that settles into a seeping sigh.

Moving past the clumsier actions that include taking her pants off while she’s still suspended, Peter is able to prod the head of his dick around the pink swell of her skin. He’s immediately welcomed with the wetness that has gathered, and its slickness makes him groan.

MJ strips her top off and kneads her tits with both hands over her bralette. Her breathing is so stinted, Peter can’t hear it at all, he can only see her ribcage expand capriciously. Peter is torn between looking at her heavy-lidded and dark face, the sharp buds that her hands work over, or where he’s slicking himself over with her.

He decides on the latter after entering, because if he thought yesterday sent the world off-kilter, then today he’s no longer on this planet. It’s so much wetter and warmer and pervasive now. Her eyebrows knot together, and she has to bring a knuckle up to her mouth to bite on, save for her from actually crying out.

Upon deciding enough seconds have passed, Peter pushes in and out of her. MJ is being driven higher up the door now, the angle changing with her position. She’s towering over Peter now, and the pressure of her falling down on him is multiplied. He just can’t get enough.

MJ blindly seeks his mouth, first finding his cheekbone, then jaw, and lastly his lips. Keeping one hand under her things for support, the other comes to tip her chin down, guiding her tongue into his mouth. Where they fuck fast and unrepressed, they kiss refined and tethered to each other’s presence.

It takes no time at all for the crescendo of their orgasms to hit, and Peter falls into that territory quickly after her sucking him off just before. MJ takes some working at, but once Peter discovers this _spot,_ it’s over as cursorily as it began. Soon, they are just two beautiful people pulled flush together, panting into each other’s mouths and sweating on the other’s skin.

“Goddamn it, MJ. What was that for?” He is utterly perplexed at what the motive of any of this could possibly be.

“Just wanted to say thanks,” she says, “for tonight. Honestly, you were amazing.”

After so many years on this Earth, Peter still isn’t quite used to compliments. “Yeah, no, uh. Of course.”

She leaves him with one last, impelling kiss.

Tonight, after he took her from the door into a fireman’s carry and thrown her limp body onto her bed, he lets his mind think things he won’t ever say out loud. She’s changing into her bedclothes and asks him to take her makeup off. He obliges, grabbing a wipe from her vanity. It felt too intimate the first time he did this for her, but it isn’t unusual for them now. She’s been drunk enough or dead tired from studying plenty of times that he’s left to wipe off the few swipes of what cosmetics remain as per her request. It’s a countless task, but just like the first time his wish to be depended on by her remains to feel fetishized as he pats away at her skin. Some swashes of brown come off onto the towelette and Peter basks in the leisure of watching her.

And so, he contemplates as she closes her eyes.

Surely, without Michelle’s influence in his life, he’d be unrecognizable. So many of his decisions have been shaped by her, though not prescriptively. And he knows it to be true should he reverse the philosophy. He’d never consider himself to be the funnier of the pair, but anyone could tell you that Michelle’s bitter and shock-factor driven humour has been placated by his own silliness. Within their microscopic eccentricities lies a reflection of the other.

Despite having known Ned for longer, even living with him during his undergrad, he would still consider them to be two separate entities. Yes, some have questioned their sexuality and relationship, but that’s just what happens between two best friends these days. All this, and yet he would not consider them to be two versions of the same soul.

It’s just different, simply put.

Peter and Michelle are the same flavour of damaged, and they both go through the unspoken routine of pretending they aren’t charity acts. Whether for their own independent pride, or out of shame, he does not know.

Her skin is glossy from the residual oil of the makeup remover. Her breathing has steadied out by now, but he knows she’s not quite asleep yet, only pretending.

Perhaps it’s a selfish thought, but it still exists behind his eyelids. A wonderment that if people have built their lives around another singular person, who does that make them? Does she belong to him, as he belongs to her? She made him who he is today, after all. All that he is, is everything that she has let him be. Most people go their entire lives without ever actually feeling this grand intensity of connection to another person. That, at least, he knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is so gooey fml im embarrassed. also tomdaya imploded literally the dAY that i last updated so im not gonna lie i lost some inspiration, but pj is forever so hoorah!!!  
> aaaaaand i didn't proofread the nasty bits so hopefully all limbs and mouths are accounted for lol, i'm gonna fix it after class after i read your feedback :)  
> on a nicer note, you guys leave me the SWEETEST and most HEARTFELT comments ever i cannot believe how lucky i am thank you guys so so much xxxxxxx hope you enjoyed!


End file.
